Cultivating Global Competencies in the BMCC Classroom
A four-day pilot workshop with New York University (NYU) faculty and administrators
from the Tisch School of the Arts, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Steinhardt School of
Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Global Liberal Studies
May 23, 27-29, 2014
How can the BMCC classroom address new interests with respect to global studies? How can the
college capitalize on its wide diversity of both faculty and students? And even as we approach
our curriculum from our individual perspectives and areas of expertise, what common themes
can be discerned in the teaching and scholarship that we already do? Over a four-day period a
select group of BMCC faculty will engage in a series of conversations with colleagues from
NYU wrestling with the above questions. The workshop will assist faculty in rethinking existing
courses in light of the increasing need to educate students as citizens in a complex global world.
The first day will introduce faculty to the “big pictures” of thinking globally as scholars and
identifying our students as global citizens. The next two days will feature four NYU faculty
who will draw on experiences in their individual fields (philosophy, history, art and photography,
music and voice) as they seek to articulate issues of importance to global citizenship and
learning. On the final day, we will ask how we can rethink concretely our own classrooms in
light of the discussions and readings of the past four days.
May 23: Day I
Introduction to participants and to topics
MORNING
“What is a globalized education?”
Discussion leaders: Jane Tylus (NYU), Alex d’Erizans (BMCC), Tzu-Wen Cheng (BMCC)
How should we teach for the 21st century student? How can we even define a globalized
education, given the increasingly wide range of international and first generation students who
are now attending community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities?
We’ll begin our Workshop with a discussion about what a globalized education “means” at the
current moment, particularly in light of multiculturalism’s impact on the curriculum in the last
twenty-five years, within a largely North American framework. We’ll then grapple with the
meaning of a globalized education in other educational and cultural systems (East Asia, the
Middle East, South America and the Caribbean, northern Africa). Only then can we begin to
understand the productive challenges that arrive when we attempt to rethink curricula for both
foreign-born and first-generation students, as well as ethnically-diverse US students.
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Readings
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David Damrosch, What is World Literature?¸chapter 1-2
Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit (chapter 1)
Selected online readings from virtual texts published by Words Without Borders;
possible visit from editors
Syllabus and course examples from “On Being Human,” team-taught freshman seminar
by Tylus and Dean Gabrielle Starr, NYU
AFTERNOON
Local Commitments & Global Connections: Examining International Student Identity
Discussion Leader: Allen M. McFarlane, Adjunct Professor and
Assistant Vice President, Outreach & Engagement, NYU
Through analysis of texts, including literature, speeches, and historical documents, we will
engage in discussion of certain questions: What does it mean to make contributions to America
as a member of an individual ethnic group? What are the societal expectations of those who
make contributions to areas such as literature, access to education, civil rights, and selfexpression? How, if at all, do these contributors fulfill these expectations?
This discussion will be in juxtaposition to a review of the national rise of international student
college enrollment and globalism on college campuses. For international students, what are the
major issues for their transition to the United States and for the classroom? What are their
motivation and goals for the future, and how do universities approach, understand and provide an
American experience?
Objectives
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3.
Provide an overview of the transition, motivation, goals, challenges of international
students at New York University
Examine how understanding the communities impact and enhance learning in the
classroom
Develop a new understanding how local commitments and global connections can
work together to achieve desired classroom outcomes and global citizen building
Readings
§ Du Bois, W.E.B., Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Dawn of Freedom”; “Of Mr. Booker T.
Washington and Others”; ”Of the Coming of John,” introduction, John Edgar Wideman,
1990.
§ "At gathering of senior international educators, the integration of international students
was a theme," by Elizabeth Redden, February 20, 2014, Inside Higher Education, 2014
§ “China Continues to Drive Student Growth in the United States,” article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, 2012
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§ “Many Foreign Students Are Friendless in the U.S.,” article in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, 2012
§ “UNESCO (United Nations Education Scientific & Cultural Organziations)” Interactive
map on Global Student Mobility, University World News, Global Edition, Issue 246,
2012
May 27: Day 2
Philosophies of Education
MORNING
What Difference Should the Recognition of Cultural Diversity Make to Liberal Education?
Discussion Leader: René Arcilla, Professor of Philosophy of Education, Steinhardt
The title question of this session will be the focus of our seminar discussion. We will begin by
examining some of the classic aims and processes of liberal learning that distinguish it from
other forms of education. This conversation will prepare the way for a consideration of how the
politics of cultural recognition raises new challenges for the liberal education project. Finally,
we will conversely speculate on how thinking of cultures as cultures of liberal learning may alter
the stress we place on their identities.
Readings
Michael Oakeshott, “A Place of Learning.”
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.”
Susan Wolf, “Comment.”
K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social
Reproduction.”
AFTERNOON
Jennifer Morgan, Professor, Depts. of History and Social and Cultural Analysis
This session will ask how we do research on people and subjects whose histories have not been
amply archived. We will use the example of writing the history of women in slavery as our
starting point, but from there raise broader questions about what archives mean, what they do,
and how they shape the histories that scholars are able to write. The readings, in this order, are
meant to bolster our conversation by beginning with Saidiya Hartman--a scholar who has made
her struggle with the archive of gender and slavery a key piece of her scholarship; moving from
her work to broader meditations on the archive for historians, and ending with Kim Hall’s short
piece that exemplifies the kind of historical work that is possible despite the problems of the
archives.
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Readings
Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead Book,” chapter seven in To Lose Your Mother: a Journey Along
the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
---------Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14.
Caryn Steedman, “’Something She Called a Fever’: Michelet, Derrida and Dust,” and “The
Magistrates,” chapters 2 and three in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers University
Press, 2002).
Durba Ghosh, “National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India,” in
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History ed. Antoinette Burton (Duke
University Press, 2005):27-44.
Kim Hall “’Extravagant Viciousness’: Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon,” in
Writing Race Across the Atlantic World” Medieval to Modern, eds. Phillip Beidler and Gary
Taylor (Palgrave, 2005), 93-112.
May 28: Day 3
Issues of Representation
MORNING
Imaging the Global Citizen: Outsiders and Insiders
Discussion Leader: Professor Deborah Willis, Department of Photography, Tisch School of
the Arts
** Each participant should view the Danger of the Single Narrative before our meeting.
Workshop participants will be asked to bring in a family photograph, or one photograph that
describes family to them.
This session will combine historical, contemporary, and theoretical approaches to address how
images are constructed through media, advertising, war and disaster, beauty, and popular culture.
The session will explore notions of stereotyping, and explore how the power of an image extends
beyond the meaning of its original purpose and takes on another form, socially and historically.
We will consider issues of representation, display and reception, as well as the wider social
context in which art and culture are experienced in private and public spaces. Using case studies,
we hope to interrogate the intersections between biography, photography, politics and visual
culture.
Readings
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View and discuss in next class: TED lecture by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie on the danger of the single story, at;
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
html
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“The context of the image” – Benetton P. 235-244 in Liz Wells – Photography: A
Critical Introduction.
Carole Boyce Davies, “Black/Female/Bodies Carnivalised in Spectacle and Space” in •
Black Venus 2010: They Called Her Hottentot ed. Deborah Willis Temple University
Press, 2010
__________________ “Secrets of Sweetness” in Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, prose and
essays edited by Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley, pp. 292-301
Susannah Walker Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 19201975 “Black is Beautiful” Redefining Beauty in the 1960s and 1970s and Why African
American Beauty Culture is Still Contested p 169-210
Beauty (Re)Discovers the Male Body pp. 112-154-Susan Bordo in Beauty Matters edited
by Peg Zeglin Brand, Indiana University Press, 2000
AFTERNOON
Contemplating Voice in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Discussion Leader: J. Martin Daughtry, associate professor of music, NYU
In this session we will examine the human voice and a small number of vocal practices in crosscultural and cross-disciplinary contexts. Voice is an exceedingly complex subject. Minimally, we
can understand it as (1) the result of a complex physiological process; (2) a privileged medium of
communication; (3) an aestheticized object; (4) a gendered, racialized and in other ways
essentialized text; (5) an acoustic event; (6) an affective force; (7) a technologically mediated
commodity; and (8) a master metaphor for self, truth, presence, and agency. The session is
designed to facilitate a discussion of the cultural situadedness of our voices, the power that
voices exert on our lives, and the factors that condition and delimit that power.
Readings
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Simon Frith, “The Voice.”
Laurie Stras, “White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the
Boswell Sisters.”
Amanda Weidman, “Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical
Music in South India.”
J. Martin Daughtry, “From Voice to Violence and Back Again.”
May 29: Day 4
MORNING
Pedagogical Implementation of Globalization
Discussion Leader: Robert Squillace and Peter Diamond, Global Liberal Studies Program,
NYU
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A conversation will take place wrestling with syllabi, course strategies, and assignments for
global competencies.
Readings
TBA
AFTERNOON
Presentations
Workshop participants will notify the group of their planned infusion of global
competencies into courses, as well as receive subsequent input and reflections by all present
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